But the increased density comes with reduced IO, similar to HDD. Most of the "density innovation" of LTO-9 etc comes with either just a longer piece of tape, or

But the increased density comes with reduced IO, similar to HDD. Most of the "density innovation" of LTO-9 etc comes with either just a longer piece of tape, or increasing the number of read/write heads along the same distance of tape. That's why, while YoY growth of tape is (checks blog...) 5%, that's lower that global HDD sales growth even this year. This is a marketing piece from the LTO consortium. Lastly, HDDs do way way better in the DC, operationally. From a much wider environment/humidity envelope of operation, to IO scaling linerally across data corpus, to siteops management, to having more than literally 1 vendor, etc.. That's why there are only two hyperscalars left deploying new tape, and even there it's dwindling or being deprecated. Now HDDs have their own problems, and their density scaling with hamr/mamr/smr hasn't gone great, but no one is really asking for less IO from devices given power cycling drives tends to reduce IO just as effectively as fewer tape drives, and for far less money.